Werner Herzog looks death row in the face

Share

How many filmmakers can claim that a death-row inmate has confessed to two unsolved murders for their camera?

Werner Herzog's conversations with American convicts facing execution are taking the German filmmaker into some unusual new territory – but they are also of a piece with his life's work, investigating, through documentaries and feature films, the human soul in moments of extremity. His 2010 doc Cave of Forgotten Dreams speculated about its birth 32,000 years ago in a cave full of remarkable rock paintings; his latest, Into the Abyss, depicts it at the moment of retribution.

"I was always fascinated by the fact we do not know when we are going to die and how we are going to die, but there are a few people, like people on death row, who know exactly every single step of the procedure and they know the day and the minute they are going to die," Herzog said in an interview during the Toronto International Film Festival. A well-preserved and powerful 69, the director may have mellowed since his days driving film crews to their physical limits to create feature films such as Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, but he still comes across as single-minded and unforgiving.

"So what do they think about life, how to conduct a decent life, how to cherish the time?" he continued.

In looking for the answer to that question, Herzog travelled to Texas and Florida and discovered, among others, Michael Perry, a sweet-faced young man executed just eight days after their 2010 meeting for his part in a triple homicide nine years earlier.

Into the Abyss concentrates on the story of that homicide, which took place in a Houston suburb: Herzog talks not only to Perry and his accomplice, Jason Burkett, who is serving a life sentence for the crimes, but also police investigators and the families of the victims, a middle-aged woman and two teenaged boys, all murdered for the sake of a car.

Of all the death-row inmates he has met, Herzog found Perry the most chilling.

"He was the last one I would ever like to meet in a dark alley in murky circumstances: The kid is the one who would decide on the spot it would be so much easier to kill you off and then take your watch, rather than hold you up," the director said, comparing him to the bigger, tougher, yet less frightening Burkett. "For me, in understanding the heart of man, he was the most dangerous."

Perry confessed to the murders and provided investigators with information only the perpetrator would have known, but on camera years after his trial, he claims his innocence. Herzog does not challenge him.

"I tell them it is not my business to establish guilt or innocence. That is the business of the court of law; that is the business of the jury. I am not into that, but the evidence against both of them is overwhelming," Herzog said. "I am a straight shooter and nobody talks to them like this.... I told [Perry]right at the beginning, your childhood was complicated and not good, which does not exonerate you.… The fact your childhood wasn't good does not necessarily mean I have to like you."

Herzog, who insists these are conversations, not interviews – as he is not a journalist – says the prisoners appreciate this honesty.

"Nobody talks to them like that," he said. "They all love me for that; every single one of them wants me back."

In the case of Florida inmate James Barnes, sentenced to death for killing a woman he had sexually assaulted, that honesty led to a confession to two other crimes, forcing Herzog to turn his tape over to authorities.

"Mr. Barnes, if I were the state of Florida, I would have one interest – to kill you off fast," he told the murderer. "But I am not the state of Florida."

Barnes is one of several inmates who will be featured in a series of one-hour television programs, commissioned by Channel 4 in Britain and focusing exclusively on the criminals, that are the second prong of Herzog's project.

Previously, the director has portrayed a man who must pull a riverboat over a mountain in Fitzcarraldo and investigated a tragically misguided naturalist in the controversial doc Grizzly Man: He has joked blackly that all his films could be titled Into the Abyss.

"The films try to look deep inside of us. It's a vertical view, looking into the abyss of the human soul," he said.

So, what does he find in the soul of a Barnes or a Perry?

"For me they are not monsters; they are human beings and I respect them as human beings." Not coincidentally, the director has stated publicly that he is opposed to the death penalty.